Transcultural Studies, 4 (2008), 151-168.

INIGO BOCKEN

SOPHIA OR MODERNITY?: THE REVERSE PER-

SPECTIVE IN PAVEL FLORENSKY AS
A CRITIQUE OF MODERN NATURALISM

Introduction: Sophia, sapientia, science1

The relation between wisdom and science is one of the main tensions char-
acterizing the development of modernity in the West. The increase of scien-
tific reason from the fifteenth century on was at the same time the beginning
of a process in which the classical ideal of theoria lost its meaning for the ra-
tional understanding of reality. The critique of nominalistic philosophy on the
divine origin of general concepts disabled the human mind to grasp the real
essence of being and as such to develop a global vision, delivering the meas-
ure for understanding the ultimate meaning of nature and practical life. Until
early modernity Sophia or sapientia remained the ultimate goal of all scien-
tific enterprise, both of moral and theoretical investigations. The ideal referred
to the moral virtue, necessarily belonging to every act of the mind and relating
the human being to divine activity. Since then, however, sapientia has no
longer been understood as the starting point, framework or goal of all ration-
ality. Although the great encyclopedic projects in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries as they were elaborated by Carolus Bovillus (1479-1567), Jo-
hann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638) or Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)2 can be
interpreted as attempts to restore the broken bond between wisdom and sci-
ence, this ideal found its end at least with Descartes’ Discours de la méthode
(1637) and finally lead to the strong separation of practical and theoretical life
as can be found in Kant’s philosophy. Of course, wisdom did not disappear
completely in the Western tradition, but the ideal was reduced to its subjective
and individual dimensions. Wisdom was now a quality of a person, independ-
ent from its scientific interests and reasoning. In the Eastern, orthodox tradi-
tion, however, more influenced by (neo) platonic Byzantine thinking, the ideal
of Sophia seemed to remain more present. At least at the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth centuries the concept of Sophia was redis-
covered, in the so-called “Silver Age,” as the basis of practical and theoretical

1. Parts of this article are result of my stay at VLAC, the Flemish Centre for Advanced Stud-
ies at the Royal Flemish Academy for Science and the Arts, Brussels, in 2007.
2. See T. Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus. Studien zur Struktur der Barocken Universal-
Gesellschaft.Am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); W. Schmidt-
Biggemann, Topica universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker
Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983).
152 Transcultural Studies

sciences. One of the main representatives of the renaissance of Sophia was,

without doubt, the mathematician, physician, theologian and art historian
Pavel Florensky (1882-1937?). As in a few other authors, the work of this fas-
cinating thinker demonstrates the firm critical attitude towards modernity,
which motivates the renewal of Sophia.

The opposition between central and reverse perspective and the problem
of modernity
In this article I will discuss this criticism by way of analyzing Florensky’s
famous attack on the central perspective, which dominated the Western
painting tradition since the days of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). In the
view of Florensky, the increasing role of the central perspective in Western art
is one of the main phenomena demonstrating the degeneration of wisdom in
modernity. According to Florensky, the central perspective is an expression of
the modern human illusion to create and control reality without any external,
divine limit. The central perspective is the death of all real human creativity,
which is driven by reality itself – this means in the view of Florensky: divine
reality.3 The Russian theologian and physician presents the “reverse perspec-
tive” as it is found in traditional religious iconography, as an alternative
painting “technique,” which, contrary to the central perspective, expresses
living – and therefore: true – reality.4 The comparison between the Renais-
sance perspective and the religious iconography shows – according to Floren-
sky – the extreme narrow character of modern rationality, of which the sub-
jectivism of Descartes and Kant is the most radical expression. The history of
perspective shows how modernity has increasingly lost every reference to the
divine and therefore all orientation towards reality. According to Florensky,
the return to the religious, theocentric iconography seems to offer the only
way to escape the prison of the central perspective, in which all creativity
comes to an end.
The strong opposition between the anthropocentric perspective of modern
art and thinking on the one hand, and the theocentric ideal of reality on the
other certainly has some attractive and relevant aspects, such as when it is
seen in the context of the discussions in art history of the 1920s, concerning
the use of perspective, initiated by Erwin Panofsky.5 Nevertheless one may
ask whether Florensky is right in arguing that the discovery of the central per-
spective in Renaissance art really implies the loss of transcendence in human
perception and living. As long as Florensky’s analysis of perspective remains
within the opposition of the “central” and “reverse” perspective, the latter is

3. See P. Florensky, Die umgekehrte Perspektive, Andre Sikojev, trans. (München: Mattez &
Seitz, 1989), pp. 68-69.
4. See Florensky, Die umgekehrte Perspektive, p. 70 and passim.
5. For a comparison between Florensky and Panofsky, see T. V. Senkevich, “The Illusive
Aesthetic Project of Pavel Florenskii,” in Norbert Franz et al., eds, Pavel Florenskij – Tradition
und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 2001), pp. 403-22.

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